Fun with Turntables: Liberating the Decks By Dancing, Loading Hacks as Records

Here’s a way to change the relationship of dancer and deck: instead of the record “triggering” dancers, the dancers move the record.

In “Autistic Turntable,” movement from onlookers gradually moves the platter. The work debuted earlier this year in the Nósomosòn exhibition at Normal at the Universidade da Coruña, España.

It’s just one experiment in turntable re-engineering from artist, open source advocate, and electronic composer Servando Barreiro. In BInaer Platten, he modifies the mechanical turntable to instead read binary-encoded records with other audiovisual media. Seen at this year’s Transmediale 12, Servando’s work was some of the most practical to respond to the theme of obsolete technologies. Among the discs you can load are instructions for turntable hacking, modification, and – crucially, for discontinued gear – repair.

BInaer Platten is an interactive installation in which an old modified 60s Philips Picnic turntable is able to reproduce “binary” vinyls containing all kind of audiovisual media. (video, images, 3d, 5.1 sound, FM synthesis, etc.)

Misinterpretations of the binary code “punched” in the vinyls will play an important role in the playback, adding certain grooves/random surprises to the content, making the sequence less repetitive, in a similar way to how probabilistic sequencers work.

This installation was shown as part of Transmediale 12 inside “Labor Berlin” in Haus der Kulturen der Welt.

And, oh yeah, Servando in addition to doing these kinds of excellent experimental installations also played some banging live dance music with Malte Steiner at the LiWoLi conference in Austria in May, all in Pd. Check out his work: